HP Vertica 5.0 Accelerates Big Data Analytics

The latest version of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform improves real-time performance for demanding business intelligence and analytic workloads.

HP (NYSE: HPQ) acquired Vertica earlier this year to tap the fast-growing market for big data analytics and business intelligence. Now Vertica is gearing up for its first major release as an HP company.

Vertica today unveiled Vertica 5.0, the latest version of the Vertica Analytics Platform. According to the company, the new version offers improved flexibility and real-time performance for demanding business intelligence and analytic workloads.

HP says Vertica 5.0 offers greater analytical power, cloud enablement, availability and ease of use. The release includes a new software development kit (SDK) that allows developers and partners to write custom methods for analyzing data directly in the Vertica database. Users can implement MapReduce and other user-defined functions through standard SQL queries.

The Vertica Analytics Platform analyzes data on a massive scale; the company says several of its customers are analyzing more than a petabyte of data in real time.

"Catastrophic risk management is facing exploding demand for very large scale data sets to be analyzed quasi-real time through ever more complex algorithms," said Philippe Stephan, chief technology officer at Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a provider of risk solutions for financial institutions. "RMS' answer to this perfect storm relies on Vertica 5.0 and the SDK, resulting in phenomenal data and algorithmic scalability for the benefit of our most demanding customers."

Vertica claims that version 5.0 delivers enhanced elasticity features that enable dynamic expansion and contraction of clusters over 20 times faster in every deployment scenario — cloud, virtual and physical — allowing users to quickly create additional capacity as needed.

"With this latest release of the Vertica Analytics Platform, we've focused on performance, manageability and extensibility for our customers," said Shilpa Lawande, Vertica's vice president for Engineering. "Our new SDK empowers users, developers and partners to create custom analytics that can be called via a standard SQL query, taking full advantage of the performance and scalability of the Massively Parallel Processing columnar Vertica Analytics Platform."

Vertica 5.0 extends Vertica's vision of Analytics Everywhere, allowing customers to leverage all of their business-critical data from various structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources. Vertica 5.0 is available immediately worldwide as a software download directly from Vertica, and will soon be available on the HP Vertica Analytics System.